...after work, I went shopping. Staples and Costco. I have to print up my textbooks.

So I get home, and there's a couple of notes waiting for me. This is how Bubby communicates to me when she wants me to do something and doesn't want to tell me herself. She saw me before I left for Staples and Costco, but I guess she doesn't like confrontations or something.

The note on the stairs that I have to be careful to step over while carying two bags of stuff and four reams of paper tells me to take my clothes out of the dryer and off of the floor. My clothes weren't on the floor when I left them - they were in the washer and in the dryer. I go over to the laundry room, and there's both loads, tossed in a small moving box. I check the dryer - nope, it's all in the box. I try to look on the bright side - at least I don't have to worry about dropping things on the way upstairs, right? As I pass the refrigerator, I find the other note. It tells me "don't go shopping for food until you've gone through the fridge, cupboards, and store room."

I snapped. See, I don't go shopping unless I'm out of food, and I don't buy all that much. I shop once every one to two months, fill the freezer and maybe get one or two things for the fridge, and a bunch of stuff in the pantry (her "store room," I guess). The idea is to get stuff I can grab on my way to work and make there with my only tools being hot water and a microwave. Anyway, I haven't gone shopping in the last month and a half - why bring this up now?

Well, the fridge is full. Bubby tends to bring home leftovers and forget they're hers, then yell at me for not eating my leftovers.

So like I said, I snapped. I went upstairs, dropped off my laundry, grabbed my box o' trash bags, go downstairs, and get to work. I start with the freezer. A baked potato with freezerburn? Trash. A chicken wing I left there a few months back? Gone. I'm fairly indiscriminate - if it looks like no one has used it in months or no one will use it for months, it's gone. Then I move to the fridge.

This is a scary thing. I find jams and wine coolers and condiments and salad dressings from years gone by. I decide to be just as indiscriminate in what I toss here when I discover the sealed mayonaise that expired in 1994.

I stopped short of throwing away the drawer full of batteries that've been stored there for decades. But I was tempted.

Anyway, the fridge has been gone through. I ended up with five and a half tall kitchen bags full of stuff, and now the trash can outside is now full of 'em. So I guess the pantry will have to wait 'till next week. I wrote "store room next week" in the blank space on her note, which I left where it was.

But that's OK. I've still got enough frozen food that I don't have to go shopping until then.